I Lost My Job & Started A Café With My 67 Yr Old Mother….This Is My Fairy-Tale Come True!

Who would have thought a simple Bengali girl living in Muzaffarnagar could make her dreams come true? My story is one of hope and courage. 

I lost my job due to covid and did not know how to support my family. That is presecisly when the idea of ‘Bengali Love Café’ struck me. Not only did I build a new identity for myself, but also gave my 67-year-old mother self-esteem and dignity.

I started my business with the help of my mother and roped in more women who needed a livelihood during such unprecedented times.

All my raw materials are directly imported from Kolkata. The best part is that my suppliers in Kolkata are also women!!

My efforts culminated into a beautiful café that caters to over 200 people daily and earns a revenue of two lakh Indian rupees a month.

Even now my mom does all the cooking & she never complains!

Even now, after such a good response and colossal demand, my mother prepares all the delicacies and I’ve never heard her complain. We have hired women to help us with other things like peeling, cleaning, chopping, and arranging. 

Once my business started getting a steady customer response, I decided to convert it into a cloud kitchen. We registered Bengali Love Café with Zomato and began receiving orders online from 15th January 2020. After which, I also partnered with Swiggy, Magic Pin, India Mart, and Dunzo to make sure that my product reached more people.

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I also began supplying cooking raw materials like spices from Kolkata, used explicitly in Bengali cuisine, to people who need them. My vertical, Groceries on wheels, which was set up in May 2020 has been performing exponentially.

Finally my dream came true. We started our own walk-in café!

Then my dream came true! A little after the success of my cloud kitchen, my mother and I rented a small space to open an outlet and launched it in May 2020. Our very own walk-in café!!

We offer over 50 Bengali delicacies that include main meals like luchi chicken curry, snacks like Kolkata jhaal muri and combo meals including doi maach combo to name a few dishes. The best part is that we also provide traditional ‘Bengali bhog’ items and seasonal sweets.

Like I mentioned we do the cooking ourselves and have hired women to help us run the café.

I am proud to have started my café with no seed money or help from anyone!

We offered jobs to around 30 women in the neighbourhood. Like my mother, these were homemakers with no exposure to the business. But with some assistance, they can now earn more money.

I am proud of starting a business with no seed money or help from anyone and scaling it to a commendable level.

I have set up a Bengali Love Café Foundation to help people in need by providing them with free meals and fruits.

We not only feel empowered but have also set a benchmark of empathy helping the underprivileged and the women in need.

If I can do it then anyone can!

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